Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439, page 19 by Various Authors
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nvey, than with personal sympathy. Among contemporary biographers, Mr Hepworth Dixon has already established for himself a name of some distinction by his popular lives of William Penn and John Howard; nor will his credit suffer a decline in the instance of the memoir now before us--that of the gallant and single-minded patriot, Robert Blake. Of this fine old English worthy, republican as he was, the Tory Hume freely affirms, that never man, so zealous for a faction, was so much respected and even esteemed by his opponents. 'Disinterested, generous, liberal; ambitious only of true glory, dreadful only to his avowed enemies; he forms one of the most perfect characters of the age, and the least stained with those errors and vices which were then so predominant.'[3] Yet hitherto the records of this remarkable man have been scanty in matter, and scattered in form--the most notable being Dr Johnson's sketch in the Gentleman's Magazine, and another in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Mr Dixon has consulted several scarce works, of genuine though obsolete authority, and a large mass of original documents and family papers, in preparing the present able and attractive memoir; not omitting a careful examination of the squibs, satires, and broadsides of that time, in his endeavour to trace, in forgotten nooks and corners, the anecdotes and details requisite, as he says, to complete a character thus far chiefly known by a few heroic outlines. We propose taking a brief survey of his life-history of the great admiral and general at sea--the 'Puritan Sea-King,' as Mr Dixon more characteristically than accurately calls his hero. A sea-king he was, every inch of him; but to dub him Puritan, is like giving up to party what was meant for British mankind. To many, the term suggests primarily a habit of speaking through the nose; and Blake had thundered commands through too many a piping gale and battle blast for that.
Robert Blake was born at Bridgewater, in August 1599. His father, Humphrey Blak